posted in content on 25 May 2008
by Andrew Lang
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A more experienced market is good news for enthusiasts

With the ever-increasing volume of affiliate, re-seller and spam websites appearing online, people are getting more cynical and discerning as to which sites they are willing to spend their time and money on. These types of sites just want your money, and they're not shy about letting you know this. You immediately feel like a "punter" reading some worn-out sales-pitch - if you bother to get past the first sentence.

With this increased cynicism, an experienced web population are clicking away from such sites without giving them any time. Conventional marketing techniques don't work online anymore simply because they've been worn out, and a more experienced online market in 2008 is a lot more cynical and wary. Trust is gaining value even quicker than gold these days.

This is great news for website owners who are enthusiasts, and who regularly add unique and useful content to their websites, since these kinds of websites are standing out more and more amongst a huge backdrop of "Stepford" websites that spend most of their time on attracting first-time visitors (via good search engine rankings) and not actually keeping them on their site, and even making them want to come back again.

"SEO" (search engine optimization) is a very well known technique now and most website owners are involving much of their time with this activity. However, this can often result in website owners viewing content merely as somewhere to put keywords they want to rank well on, instead of creating meaningful and useful content to humans (this is what people are actually looking for). So many website owners improve their rankings and visitor stats through SEO, yet find little activity actually occurring ON their site. Having someone click on your site and click immediately back to the search engine results is as useless as no click at all.

Sites that are doing well online engage their visitors and keep them on their site, and keep them coming back. Some ways in which to do this:-

Develop a writing style that is conversational but obviously informed, making people feel that someone actually wrote those words with some care and is talking to them as an equal, not a punter / faceless customer
Develop a community spirit - that might mean having an online forum/messageboard on your site, or simply a regular blog/news area, or commentating regularly on the online community you "live" in, while giving helpful advice on the members of this community
Giving away things for free like useful advice, online tools, and even free samples of tangible products
Enthusiasm! If you enjoy your business, you're very likely to be a success at it. That's reflected on a website through the amount of time and effort put into the content posted on the site

You're more likely to get word-of-mouth recommendations from regular visitors to your website than one-off visitors, as regular visitors clearly trust and LIKE your website, and come back to see what's new, and possibly make more purchases (if you're selling items).

To win regular visitors, you need to put yourself in the shoes of your visitors and think : "what do I want to see here when I visit this site? What would impress me? What would make me bookmark this site, and even recommend it to others?". A truism that is becoming well known in modern business : as a by-product of looking after your customer's goals, your own will be met.

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